The lovely three meter wide brick pipe of Toronto's "Humble Howard."

A couple of weeks ago I made a trip back to my old underground stomping (sloshing?) grounds of Toronto to go and have a look at a recent discovery made by a group of local explorers. “Humble Howard”, named after Toronto’s first land surveyor John Howard, consists of a 3 meter-high circular brick sewer that starts at the northeastern edge of High Park and eventually makes it way down towards Lake Ontario. Today it serves primarily as an overflow conduit for the smaller sewers if ever ever the city’s interceptors become overburdened.

The evening I visited the system with Kowalski, nel58 and Controleman led to the discovery of a beautiful  (but extremely foggy) connecting sewer built of brick and concrete. Its shape and overall atmosphere  gave it a certain warmth and coziness. I would have gladly followed it to its conclusion had it not been so late in the evening at that point.

Inside the combined sewer that was given the nickname "High There."

While I can’t say I’ve missed Toronto that much since moving to Montreal three years ago, I am envious of its range of possibilities when it comes to exploring the underground. Even after a decade of people actively exploring it and looking for new things to get into, there’s still a feeling that there’s still a lot of infrastructure down there that remains untapped.

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Decarie Raimbault sewer excavation, 1958. (Photo source: City of Montreal Archives)

So  “construction season” started a few days ago here in Montreal, and with it came the City’s announcement that they’ll be spending a record $608 million this year on road and underground infrastructure projects. According to a CBC report, roughly half of that amount will be spent on sewers, but I’m guessing this will mostly involve replacing watermains.  Journalists have this habit of referring to any underground pipe as being a sewer regardless of its function.

Construction crews have been busy ripping up the asphalt of the streets for awhile now, replacing the century-old iron mains with what looks to be  PVC pipe. It’s for this reason that portions of Notre Dame and Maisonneuve are currently closed off to general traffic. I’m sure overhauling some of  the older brick sewers is next on the agenda. Any piece of infrastructure that’s approaching 150 years old is bound to make any civil works engineer nervous. While I insist the old brick sewers are still in reasonably good shape, maybe the people who get paid to inspect them for a living have a better idea as to what’s on the verge of collapsing and what isn’t. Or maybe it’s just a make-work thing. Who knows?

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Inside the "7-UP" chamber.

The West Island of Montreal offers what are essentially the low-lying fruit for underground exploring. The primarily residential areas of Pointe-Claire, Dorval and Beaconsfield all make use of a separated sewer system with one set of pipes for sewage and another for stormwater. Storm drains discharge directly into the river (or Lac St-Louis) and if one knows where the larger outfalls are, one can simply put on a pair of rubber boots (or even flip-flops) and walk on in.

Most of the time this would be considered a good thing, but it seems as though the majority of storm drains in this part of the island were built during the 1970s or later using fairly simple prefab concrete components. Put another way: if you’ve been in more than a few, they’re kind of boring.

Still, they offer a respite from the stress that comes with exploring the combined sewers found elsewhere on the island. You don’t have to worry about manhole covers, e-coli poisoning, industrial contaminants, hydrogen sulfide, rats (if you’re afraid of them) or things getting swept away through three feet of fast-flowing grey water. Every so often it’s nice to not have deal with such challenges.

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